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Princesses on Dancing with the Stars

If you're not familiar with Dancing with the Stars, it is star-studded dance competition show on ABC that is already in its 25th season. Is anyone starting to feel old? I am not a regular viewer of the show, as I do not like reality shows or competitions, but I do enjoy their Disney Night. Once a year, all of the couples dress up in Disney costumes and dance to various dance remixes of Disney songs, complete with sets and props. Since ABC is owned by Disney, they go all out with these dance numbers, making the performances as entertaining as a scene from a Broadway play. This year's Disney Night, which contained three princess songs, was definitely not my favorite. Here is a summary of this year's Dancing with the Stars princess highlights from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about dance and doesn't like competition.

First up are Vanessa Lachey and Maksin Chmerkovksy performing a French waltz of "Someday My Princess Will Come" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I thought this performance was pretty enjoyable. They built a replica of the coffin that the dwarfs made for Snow White with gorgeous beams of faux sunlight streaming down on it. At the beginning of the waltz, the prince wakes her from her slumber. He gently places her back on the coffin at the end, creating a visual metaphor that she is only with him in her dreams, adding depth to the performance. I absolutely loved her costume. It was a perfect representation of the one from the movie with sparkles to make it more theatrical for the stage. The prince's costume, on the other hand, was far less screen accurate but still acceptable. The dance was very romantic, like something right out of a Disney movie.

Jordan Fisher and Lindsay Arnold's foxtrot to "You're Welcome" from Moana, on the other hand, seemed to have a great deal less effort put into it. Personally, I was not a huge fan of this song in the movie, and I like Lin Manuel-Miranda's pop remix even less. Therefore, I didn't find it that entertaining to watch a couple dancing to it. It also bothered me that Jordan's costume does not even look remotely inspired by Maui, which is a problem because they are dancing to Maui's song. Lindsay's costume, on the other hand, is a decent more mature take on Moana's outfit while still staying true to her look from the movie. It's odd seeing a Moana costume on a blond woman, but I still got the idea. My favorite thing about this number was the projection effects. The palm trees projected on the floor gave a neat shadow-like effect, and the images on the screen were very artsy and fun. However, there was definitely something lacking about this number. Last year's performance of "How Far I'll Go" by Simone Biles and Sasha Barber with a live rendition by Auli'i Cravalho herself was superior to this in every way possible. Check it out below.

I saved my favorite princess for last. Sasha Pieterse and Gleb Savchenko performed a Rumba to "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid. The set for this performance was the most impressive of the night, in my opinion. They built a full rowboat for the stage with water projections and a miniature island for Ariel to sit on. Their dance was very sensual with a variety of moves to keep things interesting. To be honest, though, I thought Ariel's wig looked kind of cheap. Disney could have done better. I also wish they had made her corset black to better match the dress from the movie. Anna's dress from Frozenwas so similar that it looks like she stole it from Ariel. I'd like to see Ariel's "Kiss the Girl" dress make more of a comeback to remind people that she wore it first. It was nice how the slits showed off her legs in a sexy but tasteful manner and that they included her hairbow accessory, even though it should have been bigger. In my opinion, this was the second-best performance of the night next to the retro "Steamboat Willie" jazz dance from Victoria Arlen and Valentin Chmerkovskiy that looked like it came straight out of a 1920s silent film.

Back around 2012, a friend of mine sent me a press release about how Disney was making a new princess show about a little girl from a poor village who becomes a princess overnight when her mother marries the king. The endearing image of the little girl on the press release instantly caught my attention with her unique reddish-brown curls, playful expression, and gorgeous lavender dress that was dripping with pearl accents. Something about this description and image got me so excited for the series that I got to work right away on making a grown-up sized cosplay of Sofia's elegant gown. The series premiered on Disney Junior with a TV special called Once Upon a Princess in which Sofia received her legendary Amulet of Avalor and sang about her insecurities for her future life as a princess heroine in the song "Not Ready To Be a Princess." I loved her instantly. Over the next six years, she took me on a four season-long journey filled with Disney Princesses, fairies, mermaid…

The internet has been buzzing about Kingdom Hearts III finally getting a release date after fifteen long years of anticipation. Unless it gets delayed again, we will be able to catch up with Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they travel through the realms of various Disney movies on January 29th, 2019. There have been a couple of trailers dropped over the last few days revealing footage from Frozen, Tangled, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Hercules, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the biggest announcement came from the latter half of last night's trailer in which Larxene of Organization XIII remarked that Elsa might be one of the new seven pure hearts that they needed for their latest quest. Anyone who has played the first game knows that this is a reference to the Princesses of Heart, a select group of Disney Princesses who had their chance to become video game royalty when they got captured by Maleficent in an attempt to use their pure hearts to open the Door to Darkness. My biggest pe…

We all had lots of fun playing with princess dolls as kids and brushing their hair until it became ratty and tangled. For those of us who are older, there has is the option of purchasing pricier collectible dolls that are made with finer details in their hair and clothes and come with their own stands for display purposes. While princesses have never exactly been lacking in options for collectible dolls, the Disney Princess Designer Collection that was revealed at the D23 Expo in 2011 was the start of something special. Each princess had her own designer dress that looked like it came straight off a modern-day runway. The collection was released alongside lithographs, cards, mugs, and other paraphernalia featuring beautiful matching artwork. The dolls themselves weren't sculpted from your typical Barbie mold. They had fully articulated wrist and elbow joints, salon quality hair that stayed perfectly in place, bigger painted eyes, and long realistic eyelashes that you could actuall…

In 2008, the Philippines released a mermaid princess telenovela that was based on a popular graphic novel by Mars Ravelo in 1952. Dyesebel is loosely based on the story of "The Little Mermaid" with a few distinct differences. It was Dyesebel's mother, Queen Lucia, who first fell in love with a human and left the underwater world of Sirenea to be with him, sacrificing her memories of her life as a mermaid in the process. Dyesebel was born on land, but because of her tail, her mother returned her to the sea, entrusting her to her best friend, Banak, to raise her. Her human father, Tino, was murdered by humans who believed that mermaids were bad luck. Unaware of the circumstances of her birth, Dyesebel grew up curious about the human world until one day, she fell in love with a human and was doomed to follow in her mother's footsteps. The 2008 adaptation of Dyesebel is performed in the native Filipino language, Tagalog, but I was able to watch it with English subtitles …

If you're one of the five people on Earth who still hasn't seen the new Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer that dropped this morning, I'm here to break it down for you. The trailer featured roughly the first half of a scene in which all of the living voice actresses for the Disney Princesses reprised their roles as Vanellope snuck into their secret internet headquarters that was presented at the D23 Expo last year. A screenshot released last week previewed the scene with Ariel missing, but now we see that she was just off-screen combing her hair with her favorite dinglehopper in a blinged out version of pink tea dress along with lots more animation of other the princesses in their oddly disproportionate new CGI style animation. Let's take a look.

For starters, it's a bit odd how Ariel and Cinderella have swapped the levels of bling on their ballgowns. In the 1950 animated movie, Cinderella's dress appeared to have made from a lightweight silvery-white fabric emblazoned w…

The internet went a little crazy when Entertainment Weekly released Disney's first promo photos of the fully costumed actors from their upcoming Aladdin remake last week. Many were disappointed with what they saw, which unfortunately tends to be the case for live-action remakes. For instance, Aladdin's signature purple vest was changed to red, making it closer to the Broadway version of the show. He was also given a relatively nice shirt underneath, which is more than a little confusing for those of us who remember how poor he was in the original film. Will Smith as the Genie looked a little too much like a normal human instead of a mystical blue entity, but apparently that's still coming. Princess fans were most excited to see previews of Jasmine's wardrobe. In terms of quantity, the internet did not disappoint. We now have images of three of Jasmine's looks that will be featured in the movie as well as a peek at her new handmaiden.

In my "Little Mermaid" origins post, I mentioned that there were three live-action movies in the works based on the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale. Since then, a few announcements have been made about all three of these movies. One of them has a theatrical release date, and it's sooner than you might think. The circus-themed indie movie that's had a trailer out for several years now is coming to select AMC theaters on August 17th. That's in two months! I wish I could be more excited about it, but the plot looks a lot closer to the 2006 tongue-in-cheek teen mermaid movie Aquamarine than the fairy tale that it's named after. The trailer focuses on how a little girl's belief in mermaids has the potential to save the aquatic heroine who is held captive in a tank at a carnival. I've been feeling indifferent about this adaptation ever since the first trailer was released, but it's nice to know that I will have the option to see it on the big scree…

Sofia the First, everyone's favorite princess-in-training, has met every official Disney Princess that existed when her show began with the sole exception of Pocahontas. The power of her purple amulet granted her the ability to summon famous princesses whenever she was in trouble. Technically, she never met Anna either, but the episode "Olaf and the Tale of Miss Nettle" implied that she was supposed to meet her but got Olaf instead because her amulet was on the fritz. About a year ago, her amulet turned pink and granted her new powers. It now sends her to help princesses, meaning that the chances of her meeting Pocahontas at this point are virtually nonexistent. Why did they acknowledge every other princess movie except this one? Actually, they did acknowledge the 1995 animated classic in an episode of Sofia, but it was very subtle.

In the 2015 episode of Sofia the First, "The Secret Library," Sofia discovers a hidden passageway beneath her castle where a boat …